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enArun Gawli: The Don of Dagdi Chawlhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/profile/arun-gawli-the-don-of-dagdi-chawl
<p>A FEW WEEKS AGO, the filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia found himself in the dingy neighbourhood of a central Mumbai <em>chawl</em>. Seated beside him, and ringed in by a bevy of burly men known in the locality as ‘shooters’, was the protagonist of one of the city’s most mythic mobster folk tales. It was dark. The don, seated there, like always, was silent and impenetrable. About almost three years had gone by since the filmmaker, along with his lead actor Arjun Rampal, first began interacting with the don and his family about the possibility of collaborating on a film on the mobster’s life. Much of this time was spent convincing him to approve the project, and then, perhaps the most crucial aspect, trying to win his trust and candour.</p>
<p>Ahluwalia was sitting with Arun Gawli, out on parole, in his own stomping ground, Dagdi Chawl, as the fruit of their joint effort was unfolding on a screen in front of them.</p>
<p>In the years it had taken to convince Gawli, both Ahluwalia and Rampal—the film’s co-producer who plays the gangster in it—had come to believe they had built a certain level of trust, even friendship, with him. He had told them things about himself and others. And very directly, too, Ahluwalia emphasises a few weeks after the screening. They had asked him all sorts of questions. They’d even had the nerve to ask if they could show him smoking a <em>chillum</em> (Gawli was known to habitually use a pipe to smoke pot). To which Gawli had turned around and asked “<em>Kyun</em>? (why?)” but agreed, once they told him that this would make the film more authentic and he wouldn’t be judged for it. He had signed the screenplay, loose leaves really, of about 100 pages of mostly just ideas of scenes and very little dialogue. Ahluwalia had noticed how he was an unusual gangster, someone who only spoke in Marathi, and had none of that swagger one associates with ganglords. And when Gawli’s son got married, late in 2015, they were even invited to it. He had opened up at least some part his guarded life to the two, they felt.</p>
<p>But as Ahluwalia sat with him, he began to wonder if he really knew much about the man beside him. Gawli was not a man easy to read. His eyes were always saturnine, his face deadpan, and his mannerism always to the point. He would be there in a conversation, Ahluwalia says, and yet not be—seemingly engaged in a chat, but with his eyes trained on all the men present. And then there were the many stories about him, with conflicting versions, depending upon who you spoke with. Ahluwalia knew he did not have the definite story. “But nobody really does,” he tells me. “It is all possible stories.” This was one reason why he decided to tell the story from the perspective of several characters.</p>
<p>It’s also why Ahluwalia was a little nervous. Dagdi Chawl was a fortress, with swarthy men frisking visitors and keeping tabs on new faces. Along with them in the small screening room were some 40 others, who every few minutes bent and whispered something into the silent don’s ears.</p>
<p>Playing out on the screen was everything. Not just what he had told them, but all that they had managed to dig up—from police files and newspaper reports to judicial case papers and anecdotes from associates. There were other narratives of other gangsters enmeshed in this principal story, whose characters dissed and even traduced Gawli. There were the stories and vignettes of men and women Gawli had never spoken about to Ahluwalia. And there were killings, brutal depictions of how things had gone down with some of his closest family and friends.</p>
<p>“It was strange to watch him watch the movie. I began to realise that when I was shooting [the film], to me all of this was just fiction. But for him, this was all real,” Ahluwalia says, “These were all really real, raw memories.”</p>
<p>Ahluwalia began to grasp that Gawli had agreed to the film with a certain vision in mind, something of a very Bollywood or Ram Gopal Verma type of gangster film. But what Gawli saw was its realism, how close Arjun resembled him, the violent narrative of his life. Ahluwalia says he could see how taken aback Gawli was. And the conspiratorial whispers of his henchmen in his ears weren’t doing his nerves any good. “It was scary, man,” Ahluwalia says. “It was so, so scary.”</p>
<p>His fears turned out to be unfounded. Gawli <em>was</em> upset, but mostly by the depiction of his mentor’s murder. It was brutal, and before he is killed, he is shown pleading for his life. According to Ahluwalia, this was one of the stories he had heard. “But Gawli said it had never gone down that way. ‘I knew him. He would have never begged’, he told me,” Ahluwalia says. But he was not angry. “He had some other minor requests, very reasonable ones, which we [acted on]. Filmmakers tend to be very exploitative. But you have to respect the [film’s subject] sometimes. And these were raw memories for him,” he says. Gawli had corrections to offer. He told them that a 1987 newspaper headline portrayed in the film was wrong. “Point is, when he watched the film, there was all this information which he hadn’t given me, or characters [and their stories]. He never once asked, ‘Who is this man? Who is this woman?’ He never turned around and said so. So there was this tacit understanding [between us] that this guy [the filmmaker] had done his homework,” Ahluwalia says. Suggesting the headline fix, he says, Gawli said, “If you are making a real film, then get all of it.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Gawli is an accidental gangster. That’s what I find fascinating about him. He wasn’t the guy in control, like the gangsters in movies. He was always the third wheel” - Ashim Ahluwalia, director and screenwriter</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When Arun Gawli was first making his way up through the ranks of Bombay’s underworld, very few seemed to have taken much notice of him. But by the late 1980s, a time when the old order of dons like Haji Mastan, Vardarajan Mudaliar and Karim Lala was being replaced by a ruthless new and gangland wars were breaking out across the city, Gawli was in the thick of things. Many years later, he adopted the politician’s garb—white kurta-pyjama and Gandhi topi—as he tried to reinvent himself as a political leader. He was a slight, sinewy man back then—long haired, dressed in floral shirts, “as hipster as anyone” as Ahluwalia puts it, who was moving up from being a small-time protector of Dawood Ibrahim’s smuggled consignments to his foremost rival. It was around this period of the internecine gang wars in Mumbai’s streets, and a bit later when he decided to contest elections, that his house in Dagdi Chawl was first opened up to journalists. And those who came back from his lair returned with the most fabulous stories. They spoke of a <em>chawl</em> refashioned as a fortress, complete with metal detectors and multiple layers of security, of a neighbourhood that insisted he be called Daddy (not Arunji), of free medical centres and <em>darbars</em> where instant rough justice was dispensed, of negotiating rooms and torture chambers, and of buttons which when pressed would reveal secret enclosures and hidden passageways.</p>
<p>Tarakant Dwivedi, a crime journalist in Mumbai who goes by the name Akela, first met Gawli in Dagdi Chawl sometime in the 1990s. He remembers being made to wait for several hours before he finally met the don. “First you had to go through this big cast iron gate. You gave your name and your purpose of visit. Then you went through a smaller gate. Then you waited. Then you gave your name to another guy who would make a call. Then you waited some more. Gawli’s men would watch the visitor, sussing him out and his possible motives, each such level determining if he was fit to be taken to the next. And if you had made it this far, you were taken through a lift to some terrace,” Akela says. The rooftop in this <em>chawl</em>, however, was nothing like any crime journalist had ever seen. He says there was grass everywhere, a waterfall and dummies of wild animals. And in one corner, he spotted a snooker table. “I was wondering where I had reached,” he says, “Was this a zoo or some jungle?” After another wait, he was taken to a room with the don present.</p>
<p>After several such meetings for articles in the newspaper Akela worked for then, a senior manager of the media house asked him to help set up a meeting with the don. The reason for this, Akela says, he is unaware of. It was not unusual for people—commoners, executives and politicians—to seek out Gawli in those days. “Anybody with problems went to him for solutions. Say, if there was no water [supply] in the police quarters, the cops and their families didn’t go to their superiors or the BMC or PWD, they went to Daddy.” Akela, wanting to impress his superior, did not want him to wait too long before he was granted a meeting. So, in one instance, without giving it much thought, Akela approached the don and gave his shoulders a firm pat of familiarity to request him to not make the manager wait for too long. It was a poorly-considered gesture, Akela realised rightaway. The entire room got tense. Gawli’s body stiffened under this touch and his men looked at him for a signal. Thankfully for Akela, the don simply let it pass and accepted his request. But he knew he’d come perilously close to a brush with the man’s wrath. “That was really very stupid of me,” he says.</p>
<p>“It is a good film. Very real. But there is also, you know…” says Gawli’s eldest child Geeta, her eyes behind a large pair of sunglasses with a golden rim, as she discusses the film based on her father, “What do you call that thing?”</p>
<p>What thing?</p>
<p>“That thing? <em>Kya bolte hain usko</em>? (What do you call that?),” she continues. “Freedom, liberty…”</p>
<p>The phrase ‘creative liberty’ is offered. “<em>Haan, wahi</em> (Yes, that one). Very real film, but also creative liberties,” Geeta says, and her sunglasses rise a little under the strain of a smile.</p>
<p>With Gawli away in prison, Geeta has emerged as the heir to his legacy. She is the chief of her father’s now much-reduced political outfit, the Akhil Bharatiya Sena, and also its lone elected representative in the city’s municipal corporation. Unlike what one might expect of a dreaded gangster’s daughter, Geeta has the air of a boulevardier. Educated in a convent school, she sits in the dull environs of a municipal office, dressed in a bright red top and sunglasses. Outside her office door might be the mandatory pictures of the Prime Minister and outgoing President, but within her large cabin, where she sits with around 25 empty chairs turned towards her, the wall behind her has a large framed image of Arun Gawli, a reminder of who she is.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“My daddy had a tough life. It was a different generation back then. Everyone was angry and hot-headed. But he was simple and rooted” - Geeta Gawli, Arun Gawli’s daughter and Akhil Bharatiya Sena leader</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Though a far cry from the elaborate access rigmarole of many journalists before me who sought her father’s time, I am impressed by the large men on her staff, and the wait in one of 25-odd chairs in her cabin, before I am ushered again to a room deeper inside. This is perhaps where she conducts more discreet conversations. Here, I see another door, and I wonder if it’s where visitors are rendered who overstay their welcome or need an incentive to make a confession. But, of course, I am letting my imagination get the better of me. This door, I later realise, only has a refrigerator with refreshments.</p>
<p>When she enters this chamber, she looks like a woman barely able to contain some vast and mysterious hilarity. Every few minutes, she laughs when she hears the stories of the impenetrability of Dagdi Chawl, its secret rooms and passageways. “In my time, I don’t remember pushing any button and some room opening up.” She, however, is quick to add, “But I don’t know how it was before.”</p>
<p>Soon she gets into a lengthy attempt to explain her father’s life as a gangster, describing the difficulties in his early years. “My daddy… you have to understand… he had a very tough life. There were so many brothers and sisters and his father worked in the mills,” Geeta says. “That’s why all his life he has been very humble. It was a different generation. Everyone was angry and hot-headed. But my dad, he was very simple and rooted. He was not like the other, you know, the other....” She pauses, looks around, and decides not to finish her sentence.</p>
<p>Arun Gawli’s father was a migrant who is believed to have moved to Mumbai to seek employment in one of the many textile mills. The family lived in a tiny housing unit in Dagdi Chawl. These <em>chawl</em>s, several hundred tiny single- room tenements within a single building where facilities like water taps and toilets had to be shared, came up in central Mumbai as affordable housing for mill workers and their families. By the late 1970s, lockdowns had become common. “Gawli’s father wanted to get back to work, but the [mills’] unions didn’t allow him to,” Ahluwalia says. By 1982, all the mills had shut down. “There was no hope going around,” says the filmmaker. And then tragedy struck the Gawli household. “The father died around that time. Leaving them with no income, leaving them all adrift in Dagdi Chawl.”</p>
<p>It was a rough locality, a place where empty country liquor bottles crunched underfoot and jobless thugs roamed the streets. Gawli, it is said, used to deliver milk when he was a child. He worked briefly in the mills. But after his father’s death, he was working the streets at night. According to Akela, Gawli began as a petty criminal who robbed people who took the serpentine overbridge that connected Byculla East to West. By then, Gawli had fallen into the company of two old friends from the locality, Babu Reshim and Rama Naik. According to the book by well- known crime journalist Hussain Zaidi, <em>Byculla to Bangkok</em>, the three of them came to form what was known as the BRA gang, representing the initials of its top three members. They ran <em>matka</em> (gambling) dens and liquor joints. In time, as their territory expanded, they added muscle. They got into a feud with a rival gang. At one point, one of Rama Naik’s brothers was killed by a member of that gang. In retaliation, as the story goes, BRA killed an important member of that gang. ‘Gawli and his men barged into his den and killed him, in full public view, brutally stabbing him with choppers and assaulting him with swords. The gruesome killing not only shocked everyone but scared the other <em>matka</em> operators, who immediately shifted their loyalties to the BRA gang,’ Zaidi writes in the book.</p>
<p>After this killing, Gawli was sucked deeper into the gangster vortex. “My reading is that Gawli is an accidental gangster. That’s what I find fascinating about him. He wasn’t the guy in control, like the gangsters in movies. He joined Babu and Rama’s gang because they were childhood friends, and Babu was kind of like their leader. Arun was always the third wheel, never the guy in charge,” Ahluwalia says. “The first [alleged] killing was done in anger, to avenge Naik’s brother’s death. That went on to a professional hit, because people had seen how audacious the first one was. And then another don tells him to do this hit, for which he will get Gawli out of the last one. So there was always this barter. The more he wanted out, the more he got in.”</p>
<p>After Naik fell out with Dawood Ibrahim over a land deal and the former was bumped off, Gawli swore revenge in response, resulting in a savage gang war that was as much about turf as honour. Each one of them took out the other’s men. Dawood had Gawli’s brother Bappa killed. And he in turn had Dawood’s brother-in-law Ibrahim Parkar done in.</p>
<p>Gawli, however, remained unreachable in Dagdi Chawl. In this locality, where some 500 families still live, whenever the police— brave or foolish enough—would conduct raids, Gawli would almost never be found. According to an unconfirmed story, he was once caught by the police in a secret drawer inside a bed.</p>
<p>But as the gang wars escalated and police squads began to liquidate mobsters in encounters, many of them fled to foreign shores. According to Ahluwalia, Gawli got himself arrested, realising that the jail was perhaps the safest location.</p>
<p>A strongman often feels that he can reshape a city. That a city turns on his command. It can take time to realise that he is only caught up in a larger narrative, one beyond his control. Gawli began to get some political backing after turning himself in. He found himself being referred to as one of “our boys” by the late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, playing him as a Hindu gangster against Dawood, the Muslim gangster. “So finally politics happens. Gawli thinks he is going to clean up, help people, going to reform himself, get political backing and police protection,” Ahluwalia says.</p>
<p>By this time, Gawli began to exhibit signs of paranoia that he was going to get bumped off by the police. It is a trait several people say he still has. Several attempts had been made on his life, Ahluwalia says. Even when he had to travel, Geeta remembers, her mother would ensure her father didn’t go with policemen but in another car with his men. When he stood for elections, it is said he never stepped out to seek votes or even to cast his vote. Gawli was particularly worried about the late encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar, who it is said used to sit in a police <em>chowki</em> that had been built outside Dagdi Chawl’s gates. The two would eyeball each other through a CCTV camera Gawli had put up outside the gate. “It was like a game was being played. He would watch the cop outside. And the cop would watch back [through the camera]. [It was like] ‘Just wait, wait till you come out’,” Ahluwalia says.</p>
<p>But the Shiv Sena, wary of Gawli’s influence in central Mumbai, did not oblige to his requests. In response, the don launched the Akhil Bharatiya Sena, and fielded candidates for elections. Geeta, who had just finished school then, remembers being told by her father that she was going to stand for an election. “I just said ‘okay’. I was so young then. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know how to talk to people,” she says. “And I won too.” Gawli also became an MLA. But the party began to diminish rapidly. “They threatened the party members. They had their way,” Geeta says.</p>
<p>She hopes she will be able to get her father freed in the near future. And then, using his help, she will gradually build the party again to win at least 10 or so municipal corporation seats in the next few years.</p>
<p>According to Geeta, while the family is now more at peace without an imminent death threat to her father, she is also careful not to make enemies. “That generation is gone now. Those hot-headed people. I just want to cool things down. Our first priority is to get our father back. He is already so old now,” she says.</p>
<p>A few days ago, with just about a month left for the film’s release, Arjun Rampal got a call from Geeta. Her father, it appeared, might be out on parole sometime in September, around the time of Ganpati festivities. And he wanted the film to release then. It would be auspicious, Gawli had apparently conveyed.</p>
<p>So what did they do?</p>
<p>“Of course we agreed,” Ahluwalia says. “How do you say ‘no’ to Daddy?”</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/ArunGawli1.jpg?itok=fBQqyy7G" /><div>BY: Lhendup G Bhutia</div><div>Node Id: 23151</div>Wed, 12 Jul 2017 18:01:02 +0000vijayopen23151 at http://www.openthemagazine.comLakshmi Pratury: Inking Ideas for Indiahttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/profile/lakshmi-pratury-inking-ideas-for-india
<p>FOR SOMEONE WHO has made it her job to network with eminent Indians, Lakshmi Pratury is surprisingly low-profile. We meet at her sparse, un- corporate office in Indiranagar, Bengaluru, which she shares with a handful of young people. She’d rather have a reigning idea associated with her name than be a “kooky” talk show host, she says, or worse, a self-aggrandising journalist who is bigger than her subject. That idea is INK—it stands for Innovation and Knowledge—a platform that showcases Indian visionaries and trailblazers, rising above the pedantry of derisive journalism and engaging in thoughtful, edifying conversation. INK, incepted in 2010, is the TED of India (Pratury is a longtime ‘TEDster’ herself) and it hosts a conference every year, bringing 60-80 speakers together to deliver readily summarised insights into startups and innovation, the arts and the sciences. “The most important parameter for judging prospective speakers is their humility-to-depth-of-knowledge ratio,” says Pratury, who is gearing up to host the conference in Hyderabad in November. Besides the flagship show, INK conducts over 50 on-demand micro-events every year at colleges, companies and institutions.</p>
<p>More Terry Gross than Oprah, Pratury, 57, likes to fight for the underdog over the celebrity, to uncover potential where one may not expect to find any. While she has interviewed many industry veterans such as Ratan Tata and Anand Mahindra, she is at her best when teasing out the action behind the scenes, be it from Lalitesh Katragadda, the creator of Google Mapmaker who was relatively unknown in India when she got him onboard, Ere Gowda, a former security guard who wrote the screenplay for the award-winning Kannada film <em>Thithi</em>, or a documentary photographer who once lived on the streets. Her eyes go wide as she talks about her ‘finds’. “They each have a point of view that matters for India,” she says. “And I am here to accelerate their growth.” The youngest and the most deserving among them—usually about 20 out of over a thousand applicants, vetted through a rigorous interview process—are chosen for the INK Fellowship each year and join the community of 150-plus fellows mentored by Pratury, and by extension, her vast network of influential Indians. They are also given a chance to speak at the INK conference alongside some of the best minds in India and videos of their talks are later uploaded to INK’s YouTube channel, giving them visibility.</p>
<p>In 2008, when Pratury was mulling a move from Silicon Valley, where she had built a career in marketing and evangelism at Intel, to Bengaluru, she didn’t know many people in India. “I knew, though, that there were hundreds of high-achieving Indians who had stories to tell, if only there was a platform,” she says. She remembers telling TED’s Chris Anderson that they needed to host more Indian speakers. “I asked him, why don’t we take the event to India? He said, okay, let’s do it. That’s how it started,” she says. Finding the right speakers for the first TED India conference wasn’t as simple. Pratury spent the better part of 2008 in India, attending networking parties hosted by her friends—the late SAP CEO Ranjan Das, venture capitalist Sasha Mirchandani, Nandan Nilekani and his wife Rohini, Mallika Sarabhai and others. “They introduced me to people who were doing exceptional work in their respective fields—science, social venture, business, music. They also wrote the first cheques for any event I would host after striking out on my own,” Pratury says. The first TED India conference in 2009 featured talks by MIT’s gestural interface whiz kid Pranav Mistry who is better known these days as the brain behind Samsung Galaxy Gear, mythologist and author Devdutt Pattanaik, social worker and activist Sunitha Krishnan, and photographer Ryan Lobo, among others. As expected, some of the talks went viral, reinforcing Pratury’s belief in India as a land of great ideas. She moved base to Bengaluru in 2010 and set up INK Talks to get the “Jack Welches of India” to share their stories, as also to give emerging thinkers a platform to express their vision.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The problem with Indians, and Asians in general, is that they don’t like to talk about what they have achieved. It is against their culture” - Lakshmi Pratury, founder, INK Talks</p>
</blockquote>
<p>INK’s objectives are coterminous with those of its speakers, who fall into two broad categories: those who have changed the world, and those who have the potential to do so. Pratury tries to ground them all in a common ethos of sharing insights with one another, and with the world. “The problem with Indians, and Asians in general, is that they don’t like to talk about what they have achieved. It is against their culture. Also, there are those who wear their false modesty on their sleeves. We try to get achievers to tell their stories on stage, so that others could learn from them,” Pratury says. Not surprisingly, there have been a few rejections along the way. The late yoga guru BKS Iyengar flat out refused an interview even though she was introduced to him by a favourite disciple. But for the most part, INK has extracted the best from many speakers. Some of them consider their INK talks definitive. Varun Agarwal, an author and entrepreneur who spoke at the 2013 INK conference about failing engineering college and founding a million-dollar company, says it is his most viewed talk till date, with over 3.3 million views. “The following year, I was invited to over 50 events, I became that popular. INK brought out the best in me,” says Agarwal, a former INK fellow, now 30 years old. Even though no other platform in India can claim such depth and breadth, INK is low-key and underrated, he says. “In a country that is forever in search of heroes, INK should have been way more popular. But people only hear the stories they want to hear; they are selfish. Which is why my talk was successful because they saw themselves in me, a college dropout who dreamt big.”</p>
<p>INK is not overly bothered about meeting conventional metrics of success. They charge about $1,000 per head as conference attendance fee, but ensure that it is a small gathering—no more than 500 people. They also have year-long engagements with most participating companies. Their fellowship programmes and road shows are funded by the Tata Trusts and other philanthropists. “Many of our fellows—and we like to pick them young—don’t make it big but that’s okay,” says Pratury. “What matters is that they are rebels with radical ideas. All we try to do at INK is to expose them to inspiring people from different disciplines, and see what happens.” Growing up in Hyderabad, Pratury spent a great deal of time at her father’s clinic (he was a paediatrician) where she would do her homework. “My dad was a poet, a writer and a freedom fighter. There could be a gathering of journalists at home today and a Congress party workers’ meet the next day. I grew up thinking that I could be a lot of things at once.” She majored in math and studied business at Portland State University in Oregon, where she also minored in theatre. “The education system straitjackets kids into focusing on a particular discipline at the cost of all other skills. It beats the creativity out of them. I realised this early on. I started getting involved in teaching theatre to business executives, and ever since, I have been advocating a multi-disciplinary approach to business,” Pratury says. “Somewhere down the line, I became a storyteller and started searching for great role models in India that I could interview and expose bright young minds to.” She is partial to technology, thanks to the years at Intel where she was part of several emerging technology groups and a brief stint with an NGO in 2005 that involved installing computers in rural India. “I saw the kind of impact the internet can have on lives in a developing country,” she says. “It is ironic that our techies and coders have to undergo crash courses in soft skills after being brought up in a culture of studious aloofness from society. They are the ones best equipped to change society today.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“In India, the price of imperfection is huge. Imagine if someone uploaded a video of Kamal Haasan or Rajinikanth snoring, the havoc it would cause”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The family of INK fellows is tightknit, and at least 50 of them are flying into Bengaluru this week for their annual meet. Kaushal Dugar, founder of Teabox, a disruptor in the market for fine tea, says the sense of community among fellows is very strong. “As a fellow, I have met people I wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise, and some of them have been instrumental to Teabox’s growth,” Dugar says. “The exchange of ideas shows you how fluid the definition of success and accomplishment really is. You meet a photographer who sees beauty in insects, and you are somehow inspired.”</p>
<p>Richa Singh, co-founder of <em>Yourdost.com</em>, an online emotional support system for those in need of counselling, says being an INK fellow opened doors for her in entrepreneurship circles, both in India and in the US, where she recently spoke at the Women Entrepreneur Quest. “Being an INK fellow set the stage for my participation in The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) conference, where I met at least 50 people that I can now approach for insights on mental health, funding and counselling programmes at universities,” Singh says. INK proved to be a multiplier for her startup, which went from serving a few thousand people to impacting 12 lakh lives, with 1,000 experts on the platform and 2,500 sessions in a day. “We got some funding offers too, though we didn’t end up signing the termsheet,” Singh adds.</p>
<p>INK fellows come in all shapes and colours— from heritage hotelier Manvendra Singh Shekhawat to Shravani Pawar from Hubli who trains women security guards, and Vicky Roy, a ragpicker-turned-photographer. Sarvesh Shashi, the 26-year-old founder of Zorba, a chain of yoga studies, says INK is more than just a business networking platform. “It is a source of inspiration, an intellectual filter through which you begin to view the world. Fellows have got married to other fellows, funded one another, and generally, become better people,” he says.</p>
<p>Pratury says INK fellows will do well not to chase after perfection. She herself has had embarrassing gaffes on stage—when she said ‘soccer’ and her guest Irrfan Khan corrected it to ‘football’ (“It was such a small thing but so culturally revealing. I was mortified.”), or when she felt underprepared interviewing the young and versatile Ayushman Khurana. “In India, the price of imperfection is huge. Imagine if someone uploaded a video of Kamal Haasan or Rajinikanth snoring—the havoc it would cause. In the US, someone like Monica Lewinsky can be a sought-after speaker for the learnings she is able to share but in India she would have to stay home and never appear in public.”</p>
<p>What does Lakshmi Pratury’s bucket list look like? James Cameron, VS Ramachandran, Aamir Khan and Amitabh Bachchan, but more importantly, dozens of young Indian minds on the cusp of greatness, waiting to be plucked from obscurity and released into the world.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Lakshmi1_1.jpg?itok=n3vXgnsA" /><div>BY: V Shoba</div><div>Node Id: 23025</div>Thu, 08 Jun 2017 11:19:37 +0000vijayopen23025 at http://www.openthemagazine.comO Panneerselvam: From Night Watchman to Captainhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/profile/o-panneerselvam-from-night-watchman-to-captain
<p>The new chief minister of Tamil Nadu O Panneerselvam, or OPS, is known by many names. He has been called Man Friday for his servility towards Jayalalithaa. He has been compared to a night watchman in cricket and sometimes even as a television remote control for allowing his leader to rule the state through him. An article in the website Scroll referred to his nickname Kanneerselvam (an apparent play on the Tamil word ‘Kanneer’ which means tears) for his affinity to dissolve into a pool of trembling tears whenever anything befell Jayalalithaa.</p>
<p>In the years he has spent as her Finance and Public Works minister and, twice, as her chosen chief minister, he has used every public podium to demonstrate unflinching devotion towards Jayalalithaa. He has prostrated in front of her, clasped his hands in benediction before her chopper landed, sobbed his way through his own swearing-in ceremony, and even ruled as CM without actually sitting in the CM’s designated chair. He is said to carry a picture of Jayalalithaa on his car dashboard and another in his shirt pocket.</p>
<p>To the larger world outside, his is an image completely divested of personality and known only for loyalty. All of this of course makes sense. In a political party centred on the personality cult of Amma, power only flows through proximity to her.</p>
<p>The 65-year-old Panneerselvam is the son of a fairly successful farmer. He was born in the state’s Theni district and used to help manage a dairy farm and even ran a tea shop in the 1970s. Like many others at the time, he is believed to have been fascinated by the cine-star and politician MG Ramachandran, and joined AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) sometime in the 1980s. When MGR died and AIADMK split into two factions in 1987, he threw his lot with MGR’s wife Janaki Ramachandran. But he later made amends and was able to switch over to Jayalalithaa’s side. He was chairman of Periyakulam Municipality by 1996. Five years later, he was finance minister, and for a brief period, even CM. It is said many were surprised that Jayalalithaa picked him to fill in as CM back then because there were several more senior ministers around. About 12 years later, when another stop-gap CM was required, very few were surprised to see him chosen again.</p>
<p>Panneerselvam belongs to the Thevar caste and is believed to have consolidated his party’s position among the large and dominant Thevar community. In the 2014 general elections, for instance, as reported by several media outlets, the AIADMK won nine out of 10 seats in southern Tamil Nadu. The Thevars are the majority community in these parts.</p>
<p>After Jayalalithaa’s death was announced at midnight, Panneerselvam was hurriedly sworn to power by the Governor. The new CM is experienced in matters of administration and well-liked within the party. But it is unsure who will really come to hold the reins of the party. Will VN Sasikala, Jayalalitha’s close aide and confidante, who has over time come to be known as ‘chinnamma’ or younger mother, pull the strings from behind? Sasikala is also a Thevar and, for the moment, is backing OPS. Although she has never really held any administrative post, she wields considerable clout as Jayalalitha’s friend. In Jayalalithaa’s last journey through the city into her funeral at Marina Beach, Sasikala and her family stood steadfastly by the departed leader’s side. She conducted the final rites. When Rahul Gandhi appeared, he was introduced to both Sasikala and her husband Natarajan.</p>
<p>Panneerselvam spent most part of that journey in the background with other ministers and party members. When Narendra Modi appeared, Panneerselvam did what he has excelled at several times in the past. He broke down into a pool of tears, until Modi had to hug and console him.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Web-panneerselvam.jpg?itok=DggL83lq" /><div>BY: Lhendup G Bhutia</div><div>Node Id: 22317</div>Wed, 07 Dec 2016 11:33:14 +0000vijayopen22317 at http://www.openthemagazine.comParmeshwar Godrej, the First Socialitehttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/profile/parmeshwar-godrej-the-first-socialite
<p>After Parmeshwar Godrej’s (1946-2016) demise on 10 October, a wide range of personalities from remarkably disparate fields offered their condolences in public. There were world-famous authors, academics and economists, politicians, artists and designers, business tycoons, actors and filmmakers, quotes from journalists and socialites, and at least one Nobel laureate. People so varied, you would be hard-pressed to pin them to a single newspaper page. Yet they were there together like a Parmeshwar Godrej-hosted party.</p>
<p>When asked, most of them seemed unsure as to what defined her. Was she really just a socialite with a famous surname? Yes, she certainly threw Mumbai’s most famous parties, hosted the cream of the international jet set, from Goldie Hawn to Oprah Winfrey. But she was much more.</p>
<p>Born to an upper-middle-class Sikh family, Parmeshwar is rumoured to have been selected to become one of Air India’s earliest flight attendants by its then chief JRD Tata himself. She was around 17 years old when she met Adi Godrej, then about 21. After a brief romance, the two were married by 1965. Despite the glamour of their lives, Adi and Parmeshwar Godrej, along with their three children, remained a close-knit family.</p>
<p>Usually those marrying into rich families have to alter their lifestyles to suit the household. In the case of the Godrej family, the reverse seemed to happen. She brought glamour and style to the large but somewhat staid Godrejs. Wearing her signature beret and oversized glasses, even to an evening party, always stylish, always bronze tanned, she threw lavish parties, hosted the biggest names that visited Mumbai, promoted artists and championed social causes. She was one of the first Indian celebrities to campaign for AIDS awareness. In 2004, along with Richard Gere, and backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, she launched the Heroes Project to combat AIDS and got celebrities like Imran Khan, Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan to work for the cause.</p>
<p>Adi Godrej is reported to have once said, in a book, ‘Our best advertising was due to her (Parmeshwar).’ When Godrej tried to revive Cinthol after the group’s split with Procter & Gamble, then a relatively small brand, as The Times of India reports, Parmeshwar got her friends Imran Khan and Vinod Khanna to endorse it. She was possibly India’s first designer when she helmed Dancing Silks, a high-end boutique, in the 1970s. She refashioned iconic restaurants and famous homes as an interior designer. She set up a production studio. From the pre-liberalisation era, when high-society parties were infrequent, to the glitzy globalisation phase, Parmeshwar dominated the very idea of high-society dos for over half a century.</p>
<p>It is said that there was only one way to figure out if you have arrived in Mumbai’s good life: either you’ve been invited to a Parmeshwar Godrej party or she’s been to one of yours.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Web-Parmeshwargodrej.jpg?itok=vom_wuNK" /><div>BY: Lhendup G Bhutia</div><div>Node Id: 22105</div>Thu, 13 Oct 2016 12:15:59 +0000vijayopen22105 at http://www.openthemagazine.comMohandas Pai: The Renewable Manhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/profile/mohandas-pai-the-renewable-man
<p>A LARGE PICTURE window in TV Mohandas Pai’s office on Millers Road in Bangalore frames a canopy of trees. Plush brown sofas, a television flashing stock market news, framed memorabilia and Pai’s imposing frame sheathed in trademark rumpled kurta populate the space that one could easily mistake for just another office. This, however, is a modern approximation of the French salon through which many statesmen, thought leaders and plutocrats have walked, no doubt bracing for Pai’s brand of political incorrectitude. It has been a rallying point for some of India’s best startup ideas—business plans that withstood Pai’s savage criticism and were rewarded with the financial and strategic wherewithal to make it big. Great currents of thought have flowed through this open door of possibility. This is arguably the promised land for every aspirant for fame in Bengaluru. For here you could chance upon one of the world’s leading philanthropists taking notes on amending a less-than-ideal ratio of yearly spend to the corpus of his foundation, a ruling party politician who finds himself drawn into a disquisition on civic awareness, or ruffled young men learning to plug the holes in their business pitch. Pai is the connective tissue between them all. And he seems to enjoy a panoptic view of society. “He can speak at length on the atomic bomb, or about phonetics,” says U Ramadas Kamath, executive vice-president and head, facilities, administration, security and sustainability at Infosys, of his former boss-turned-close friend. “He is a rare individual who dreams big but also has an eye for the smallest detail,” Kamath says.</p>
<p>The finance maven who, as CFO, helped brand Infosys among global investors, set standards in transparency and corporate governance and architected India’s first employee stock option plan, has, since leaving the IT bellwether in 2011, turned his energies to another, vaguely contiguous world. In just a few years’ time, he has emerged as one of India’s top startup evangelists and angel investors by knitting together people with operational experience, a deep understanding of markets and business strategy and the ability to access capital. The prime mover in a dozen funds, currently funded with $325 million with a total target of $650 million, Pai, 58, has a stake in over 130 startups across asset classes like deep tech, education, real estate and public markets. He has personally helped build many into sturdy businesses and the results are beginning to show. Earlier this year, Aarin Capital, the first fund founded by Pai with Manipal Education and Medical Group’s CEO and MD, Dr Ranjan Pai, made a lucrative exit from education technology startup Byju’s. As early stage investors, they had put up about $9.2 million in late-2012 and netted four-fold returns after Byju’s raised $75 million from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and Belgian investment firm Sofina this March. Byju’s claims to have 120,000 subscribers paying on average Rs 11,000 per year to access its digital classrooms. Not long ago, when founder Byju Raveendran was struggling to acquire customers, it was Pai’s number crunching that helped him pivot. An information junkie, he compared data from the last two Censuses and recommended that instead of targeting Class X-XII students who were about to start attempting competitive exams, he should start adding value early on, from Class VII. Raveendran heeded his advice, built a solid parent-facing app to help track students’ progress, and cracked the notoriously difficult education tech market.</p>
<p>Pai knows exactly what he brings to the table. He is proud of his long stint at Infosys, overlapping with the Indian infotech zeitgeist. “Tell me how many people have helped scale a company from $5 million to $6.5 billion over 20 years, who have won the best Indian CFO award for several years, ran businesses globally, met 300 investors a year, helped hire 160,000 people and train 225,000 as HR head, and supported a product business like Finacle?” he says in his breathless style. “I realised that there are very few people like me. This is something Ranjan Pai and I have in common. He turned a $200,000 business into a $1.6 billion empire. So we know a thing or two about scaling up,” says Mohandas Pai, who is Chairman, Manipal Global Education.</p>
<p>Pai was an early believer in the potential of startups that were setting out to run India efficiently. He also thinks they will create nearly three million jobs in the next decade. “What I fear is that Indian capital is only 5 per cent of the total capital coming into venture. In China, it is 65 per cent. I worry that in the next 5-10 years, India will become a battlefield for Chinese and Western capital. There is not enough Indian ownership because our Indian capitalistic class is not investing in this high-growth area,” he says. “About 20,000 startups have created 350,000 jobs so far. In 10 years, there will be 100,000 of them, generating 3.2 million jobs. By 2025, IT services and startups between them could have 10 million well-paying jobs. There is no other industry that can employ educated middle-class Indians in such numbers.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tell me how many people have helped scale a company from $5 million to $6.5 billion over 20 years, and helped hire 160,000 people? I realised there are very few people like me</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Shortly after V Balakrishnan, who had succeeded him as Infosys CFO, left the company, he came to meet Pai and the two set up Exfinity Venture Partners, a Rs 125 crore early-stage fund investing in B2B startups. “In India, all the funds were managed by finance guys, not by practitioners. We said we would put in 25-30 per cent of the money and found that even bankers were willing to raise funds for us, purely out of trust,” says Balakrishnan. At Infosys, they worked together on landmark annual reports, hammered out ADR guidelines, redeemed the finance department and brought it to the forefront of the company. On their first trip to New York in the late-1990s, they walked the city on foot. Two decades later, they walk the corridors of power and policy making, and argue just as much. “Mohan and I have a good-cop, bad-cop thing going when we meet startups,” Balakrishnan jokes. None of Exfinity’s investments is made on a whim. The fund, which is now raising money for a second innings and is in talks to set up an offshore entity, met over 500 startups before investing in nine, long-term technology bets including Riversilica, a solutions provider for IP streaming video delivery; Uniken, a digital connectivity and access platform; and Mad Street Den, a computer vision and artificial intelligence company.</p>
<p>Ask Pai about an e-commerce bubble and he comes at you with guns blazing. “People like you don’t know the markets,” he jibes. “I was in the Nasdaq market when Infosys’ valuation went up from $19.50 billion in January 2000 to $46.7 billion in March and came back to $21.70 billion by the end of April. That is a bubble, not what’s happening with startups in India.” At first, I find him impatient with the very texture and pace of language. He prefers the clarity of numbers and has a combination of wit and vigour that the French call <em>esprit</em>. “Record this. I speak fast,” he warns. I am tempted to revise my provisional assessment of him as the conversation inevitably veers to politics. “I have seen the rise of a great country that reformed itself. I have seen the rise of a great industry and played a big part in it. So it saddens me when people try to belittle Indians, peddle wrong data and say we are intolerant. India is a complex country with many problems, but per million population, we are no worse off than any large country,” he says. Pai has strong views on the role of the Congress and the Left—“for whom the real India is all bad”—in the articulation of Indian history, and he frequently airs them on TV, social media and public fora with no thought to consequence. “I’d rather talk to Arnab Goswami, who offends everyone and has no agenda, no sacred cow, rather than to devious journalists who want to impose their views on others,” he says. “People can fight me anywhere, I have got the data and I am happy to be proved wrong on the basis of facts.”</p>
<p>“He is an information sinkhole,” says his older son Pranav, 27, who, along with his brother Siddharth, 23, manages the family office, 3one4 Capital, which has about 40 startup investments. “He makes sure you know he knows what he is talking about and this comes across as aggressive to some people. It is just that he can overwhelm you with logic and data,” says Pranav. Pai’s sons—Pranav has an engineering degree from Stanford and Siddharth is a chartered accountant—regularly meet startups and troubleshoot, freeing up much of Pai’s time for more important interventions in business strategy, public engagements and regulatory consultations with the government. He also spends his time reading and advocating good governance—he started the Bangalore Political Action Committee with Biocon Chairperson and MD Kiran Mazumdar Shaw in 2013 to help groom a generation of responsible local leaders—and philanthropy, besides engaging in Twitter duels.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Despite being on the Infosys Board, sometimes I felt like an outsider. The founders met among themselves often and I never became part of this private club</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pai is an oddity in the world of business: an abrasive and opinionated man who has managed to network with the who’s who of tech, a sour critic who is also a big dreamer, a capitalist who admittedly wants to “make loads of money” and give much of it away. “It is just as hard to convince him to invest in your business as it is easy to get him to donate for a cause. He is a terrible taskmaster,” says Anil Shetty, one of Pai’s young protégés and the man behind Peace Auto, an initiative to give Bengaluru autos a makeover. “He is my worst critic and my biggest strength.” When Shetty became a public face, Pai chided him for his self-importance and told him to stop ‘giving <em>gyan</em>’. A viable credo in life, he told him, is to want little for yourself, so you have the time to dream big for the world. “He has an old Toyota Corolla he refuses to replace. Should you ride with him and make the mistake of suggesting that he turn on the air-conditioning, he will tell you to breathe in the fumes and the dust and that it will make you stronger,” adds Shetty.</p>
<p>THE CONSENSUS SEEMS to be that Pai is an insufferable boss and a helpful human being. “He is very approachable,” says Vivek Gupta, co-founder of Licious, a year-old online meat shopping platform that Pai was among the first to invest in. Licious claims to deliver over 10,000 orders a month and raised $3 million in series-A funding this April. But when Gupta and his partner Abhay Hanjura first pitched their idea to Mohandas Pai, he sent them packing. “He bombarded us with questions and told us we needed to put in a lot more work,” Gupta says. Pai then helped position Licious as a premium brand trying to solve the problem of buying fresh meat. “He insisted that we focus on Bengaluru, which has the highest per capita income of any city, rather than spread ourselves thin. ‘You are trying to disrupt the ecosystem, <em>saste mein nahin bechna</em> (don’t sell cheap),’ he told us. The second meeting ten days later was very different. He was finally listening to us,” says Gupta. Licious is today one of Pai’s blue-eyed companies. “We have a simple rule of thumb. Anything we want, we write to him, whether it is about leasing land or meeting the media. He connects us with the right people,” Gupta says. Indeed, Pai has emerged as liaison extraordinaire for Bengaluru’s startups, taking up their cause with Delhi and working with governments to expedite processes and get clarity on regulations. “The man is a supercomputer,” says Karnataka Industries Minister RV Deshpande. “He is consulted on various policy matters around infrastructure and industry because he is not only knowledgeable, he is also selfless and willing to help,” he says. In 1997, as state industries minister, Deshpande ushered in India’s first infotech policy, drafted primarily by Pai and his peers. “At the time I knew little about IT. I just signed the draft. Pai is a visionary. Although he may bruise political egos with his truthful manner, I think it is something we all overlook because of his sheer brilliance,” says Deshpande.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Pai is a visionary. Although he may bruise political egos with his truthful manner, I think it is something we all overlook because of his sheer brilliance</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And there it is, the paradox of being Mohandas Pai. Pai the merciless socio-economic observer is respected and reviled equally, but then, so was Pai the corporate reformer. Let us rewind to 1993, when a young finance professional in Bengaluru was about to quit his job at Prakash Leasing, where he had worked for over seven years, earning little. Pai had a degree in commerce and another in law; he was a rank-holding chartered accountant and even ran a practice briefly. At this critical juncture, when he nearly moved abroad to earn a better livelihood, for he had to support his wife and two sons, Infosys was planning an initial public offer. Those were times when Pai crunched company balance sheets for breakfast. (According to a friend, he had collected about 4,000.) With his characteristic curiosity, he went to the Infosys pre-IPO investor meet and then to a meeting of analysts in Mumbai, where he posed some deep, searching questions. “Vallabh Bhansali (the Dalal Street veteran who managed the IPO) was on stage and he advised Narayana Murthy not to answer one of my questions,” Pai remembers. Murthy and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani decided to get Pai on their side. Starting 1995, Infosys became a 14-hour daily obsession with Pai and Murthy’s extraordinary leadership inspired him to work hard. Soon, he was handling infrastructure, laying the groundwork for what would become the best campuses in the country. He won acclaim as CFO, enabled the first listing of an India-registered company on Nasdaq, and went on to chair HR, where he brought in a nine-hour clocking policy to improve efficiency, much to the consternation of managers who were, in his words, “goofing off”. “Mohan had unlimited curiosity, never hesitated to question anything, and was willing to take bottomline responsibility for any tasks. These are qualities of an extraordinary leader. He has added enormous value to the company in various roles in finance, HR, education, administration and creation of physical infrastructure. We will always be grateful to him for his contribution,” says Infosys Chairman Emeritus NR Narayana Murthy.</p>
<p>Some in Infosys, however, saw him as a career <em>arriviste</em>, and were none too happy with his outspokenness and occasional <em>gaucherie</em>, or the way he could hold his own with Murthy, the then CEO. “There was a sense among certain sections that he was overstepping,” says a source who worked at Infosys for over a decade. “People begrudged him for being Murthy’s favourite, but neither seemed to care.”</p>
<p>Pai, however, admits to feeling like an outsider. “Infosys was my dream company and I achieved here all that I had set out to achieve: to set industry standards, to help create a company which would be an exemplar for others, to contribute to the country’s growth and development and to excel in top management roles.” But there was something that always rankled with him: “Despite being on the Board and despite setting standards, sometimes I felt like an outsider. The founders met among themselves often and neither I nor Balakrishnan ever became part of this private club. I felt that this manifested in the way CEOs were picked. Murthy had said that the best person would become CEO but it was his co-founders who would take the job time and again. We all hold Murthy in such high regard that we expect him to be nothing but perfect, but no man can be 100 per cent perfect. I believe Murthy is an extraordinary entrepreneur, the best India has had, I would say even ahead of JRD Tata and Dhirubhai Ambani, because it was Murthy who gave middle- class Indians respect and recognition globally. He had started with nothing and was competing globally,” Pai says.</p>
<p>IN 2011, PAI decided to leave his stamping ground for a wider stage. His friends, a group of lawyers and accountants he went to school with and who have known him for nearly 40 years now, say they have never seen him as perturbed as on the day he left Infosys. The company had become his chief identity. “He always wanted to work in India’s best company and Infosys gave him that platform. But I felt that while he represented a global company, he had to wear a thin mask, maybe even without realising it. It is after Infosys that he emerged a thought leader,” says Abhay Jain, perhaps Pai’s closest friend since Class VII at St Joseph’s Boys’ High School, Bengaluru. Jain, who is now advisor, corporate affairs, Manipal Education and Medical Group, has also worked closely with Pai on Akshaya Patra, a landmark midday meal scheme for 1.6 million children. It started in 1999 when the two happened to visit the ISKCON temple in Bengaluru and saw it was equipped to cook large quantities of <em>prasad</em>. “Mohan asked me, can you supply food to government schools? I agreed, but asked that he donate a vehicle to ferry the food. Soon I had a fat file staring at me, with requests to feed one lakh children. All this within a couple of months, when we still had one vehicle and were serving 1,500 children,” says Madhu Pandita, president, ISKCON Bangalore, crediting Pai with sowing the seeds of a project that would spread to 11 states. The Akshaya Patra Foundation was set up as a secular, non-profit organisation in 2000 after Jain organised a meeting with Murli Manohar Joshi, who remarked that what they were trying to build was like the <em>akshaya patra</em>, the inexhaustible vessel from the Mahabharata. The reason Mohandas Pai has been at the heart of several such epic stories is because he learned early in life to stand up for what he believed in, says his classmate KS Ravishankar, now a noted practitioner of indirect law in Bangalore. In college, he remembers, Pai led an open agitation against the erratic evaluation of their second-year accounting paper. “The university ordered a re-evaluation, which was unheard of in those days,” says Ravishankar, who shared Pai’s enthusiasm for reading and exchanged notes with him on Churchill’s speeches, John Kenneth Galbraith and the origins of Indian civilisation. “In any case, he was a rebel and a sharp one at that. He gave the teachers a run for their degrees,” Ravishankar says.</p>
<p>“In the end, we only have memories, don’t we?” says Pai, looking out of place in Manipal’s plush new office on the 15th floor of JW Marriott in central Bangalore, overlooking the green expanse of Cubbon Park. “And they are enough,” he says.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Renewableman1.jpg?itok=Zv4nkemb" /><div>BY: V Shoba</div><div>Node Id: 21974</div>Wed, 07 Sep 2016 18:47:06 +0000vijayopen21974 at http://www.openthemagazine.com